Are You Hungry, or Are You Missing Someone?

March of 2020 was the beginning of what would grow to be one of the biggest medical and economical issues the world has seen in decades. One that only intensified with time, proportional to the damage it made; resembling a small snowball rolling down a hill as it increased in size and its ability to damage.

It all happened swiftly. One day we were all joking around in close proximity to one another, and by the next, the streets were eerily empty, and any sound other than your own breathing resulted in an intense flinch.

Some could argue that the worst of quarantine was the confusion, a result of being left in the dark by the people of higher power. While others could argue that the worst of quarantine was the lack of social interaction, especially to those whose lives were brimming with it.

Whichever one it was, no one was impervious to the aching feeling in their chest when they recalled memories with friends or family. The feeling of longing, of looking back at things in our lives with no idea when we’d go back to them.

But what is this feeling exactly? And is there a possibility you were confusing it with something else?

Researchers at MIT found that during social isolation, the feeling of longing that you feel is similar, on a neurological level, to the craving you feel when you’re hungry. Rebecca Saxe, Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as well as a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain research commented on their findings:

“People who are forced to be isolated crave social interactions similarly to the way a hungry person craves food. Our finding fits the intuitive idea that positive social interactions are a basic human need, and acute loneliness is an aversive state that motivates people to repair what is lacking, similar to hunger.”

(Quote from https://news.mit.edu/2020/hunger-social-cravings-neuroscience-1123)

This study has been well in the works for a while, long before the pandemic. It was actually inspired by another study done in 2016 by Kay Tye, a professor at the Salk Institute:

During this study, they placed volunteers in isolated environments for up to 10 hours, making sure no social interaction was possible. After these 10 hours were up, the volunteers were placed in MRI machines in order to decrease social interaction as much as they could. This was only possible due to proper training that was given to the volunteers before the experiment. While they were being scanned, they were shown images of people interacting with each other, along with neutral images (ones not related to social interaction nor food) to serve as a control variable. The researchers then observed the brain activity in the Substantia Nigra, a part of the brain that has previously been linked with hunger cravings.

On a different day, the same volunteers fasted for 10 hours. They were scanned in MRI machines and shown images of food, along with neutral images of neither food nor social interaction. As the researchers expected, the signal produced in their Substantia Nigra following 10 hours of fasting was similar to that produced following 10 hours of isolation.

The results also differed depending on the history of the individual. Volunteers who reported having a more active social life felt the effects of isolation stronger than the volunteers who reported otherwise. Different degrees of isolation prior to the study produced different degrees of effectiveness on the brain.

The moral of the story is, the next time you think you’re missing someone, just backtrack and ask yourself if you’ve eaten that day.